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Film Review: Patriots Offense and Defense Sucksonville Edition

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Nothing like an emotionless deep dive into the All-22 to give you a nice football reminder how scary it can look when even good teams play bad. I left my film review with a near-exact feeling like I had after breaking down the Patriots loss to the Chiefs in 2014. This is what happens when everyone takes turns making bad mistakes until things are just totally unraveled. Add in a talented young team playing a near-perfect game, making miraculous plays in heavy heat and it’s recipe for disaster.

And that’s what this loss was. But it was still just one loss in week two under extreme conditions. What we see in Detroit will be far more toward the center of who this team is. There might still be issues but no defense can play this perfectly bad two weeks in a row, especially a Patriots defense.

Flip just a couple plays and this is a ball game in the fourth quarter. But that doesn’t mean the Patriots don’t have issues to fix. Getting Josh Gordon this week proved that. But is it time to dip into the rookies at cornerback? At least there are options, whereas we’re all just holding our breath hoping Dont’a Hightower gets through the season on his knee.

More on that and everything else in the film review.

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Foxboro & Friends: Episode 1!

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Excited to introduce the first episode of Foxboro & Friends, a new webshow I’m doing with Nick “Fitzy” Stevens! We’ve got big things planned and this is just our Wayne’s World’y first episode, but we’re glad to be able to launch it after such a bummer loss.

Please like our Facebook page as we hope to get back to doing live broadcasts there.

Much more to come!

Will Josh Gordon to the Pats Work?

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QAiLZKL5hI

The Patriots once again proved that the team building process goes well into the season as they acquired wide receiver Josh Gordon from the Browns.

My initial reaction is just wow, because it’s so exciting to think what Josh Gordon playing at his best would do for the Patriots’ offense. But the chances seem remote that Gordon not only buys into the Football Machine but that he stays the straight and narrow, immersing himself in the culture and takes to it like Moss 2007.

Perhaps a more plausible case will be that McDaniels throws him some Patterson-esque plays, and he isn’t quite Moss 2007, but he’s a guy that can chip in with a couple plays a game (CAN YOU SAY UNDERNEATH CROSSERS?). After last weekend, even a couple plays per game sounds appealing.

It will be interesting to see how problem child Gordon takes to New England. It’s a huge opportunity for him, to finally tap his unquestionable talent, or let it all go to waste probably for the last time. It’s no easy task, he’ll have to totally buy in, and it’s been apparent that totally buying in was never his thing in Cleveland. Still, that’s Cleveland.

The Patriots have strong organizational stability and can afford to roll the dice on Gordon. He’ll be treated just like everyone else and he’ll either cut it or be cut.

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Pats Posits: Brace for Hot Takes

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The 2018 Patriots fell back to earth with a thud, losing to the Jaguars in a decidedly lackluster performance.  The defense, losing both key cogs Patrick Chung and Trey Flowers to concussions, looked every bit as terrible as the squad we saw against the Eagles in Super Bowl 52.

Offensively, the Patriots completely fell into my gameplan trap. They couldn’t run the ball, got into third-and-longs and couldn’t covert. There was no explosiveness out of the offense with Phillip Dorsett and Chris Hogan largely invisible and Cordarrelle Patterson‘s trick plays largely ineffective.

Not much worked for the Patriots on Sunday. But this isn’t uncharted territory and September stinkers are often the norm, not the exception. They looked every bit as listless against the Chiefs in 2014 and 2017 and both those squads still made the Super Bowl. If anything this is just a reminder that it’s a long season and what happens on September 15th can often have little or no effect on what happens in February.

The important thing is to figure out ‘what now.’ The Patriots still fought hard, a sign of nearly all Belichick’s teams, but they made way too many mistakes and way too few plays. Building off sparks like Kyle Van Noy‘s interception and Stephon Gilmore‘ and Trey Flowers’ forced fumbles. These Patriots never packed it in, but do they have the pieces to overcome the glaring number of shortcomings they displayed?

Let’s dive into some gut reaction Posits.

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Patriots Gameplan: Week 2 at Jacksonville Jaguars

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Week Two is here and the Patriots face a tough AFC Championship rematch on the road in Jacksonville. How many times have we seen these kinds of games early in the season? The young upstarts are looking for a franchise-altering win. Sometimes, like the 2009 and 2010 Jets,  they live up to the hype. But often the emotional drain of beating the Patriots makes the young upstarts sleepwalk through the rest of their season.

More often than not the Patriots just prove their still the Patriots.

There’s no question the Jaguars are a talented team, but talented teams are hit or miss when they go against methodical football machines. If the Jags play with the kind of energy that the 2009 Jets did, they could and should exact their revenge. The Patriots are in it for the long haul though and even a loss in Florida that exposes flaws will be just a bump in the road of their development toward December and January.

It’s always fun to have an exciting road game against a potential new rival early in the season. What do the Pats have to do to get the win and make the rest of the league Patriots-depressed again?

Here’s the gameplan.

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A Look Back: Patriots-Jaguars 2017 AFC Championship

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The 2017 AFC Championship was a dogfight down to the end, with the young and hungry Jags pushing the Patriots to the very limit. Really, the Jags exposed the Patriots in a way that the Eagles would build off of in Super Bowl 52. They had quite a few chances to put the game away, but the Pats do what they always do, hang on and make the key plays at the end.

Despite some limitations of Blake Bortles, the Jags are one of the teams vying to dethrone the Patriots from AFC supremacy, and they certainly have the defensive pieces to make it happen. But this is a different Patriots team than the one that played last January and that includes both good reasons and bad reasons.

What can we determine from last year’s matchup? That this will be a test for the 2018 Pats that truly tells if they’ve put the problems of last season behind them.

The Patriots had a slow start to the game, falling into a 14-3 hole. The Jags sniffed out most of the underneath stuff Tom Brady, with a stitched-up hand, loves to rely on. Much of the offense relied shot plays to Cooks, or the PI calls that came with them sometimes. It was a true grind-it-out offensive performance and one that will be hard to replicate with entirely new pieces.

The simple fact is that the primary players outside of Brady who helped the Pats win this game are no longer on the team. But the flip side of the coin is that the defense which made just enough plays to win is much improved.

So which side wins?

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Film Review: Patriots vs. Texans Defense Edition 2018

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After years of focusing heavily on the Patriots’ defense it’s easy to see after the first game how new defensive coordinator Brian Flores has simplified things. They still did plenty of rotation of players, but this was as polished a defensive game as we’ve seen from a Pats team that often gets off to slow starts.

The defense was flying to the ball and looked well in-sync between coverage and pass rush. Most impressive, an array of front seven players who all won one-on-one battles. It is that Flores is sending all kinds of new pressure that Matt Patricia wasn’t, it’s that players like Trey Flowers, Keionta Davis, Dietrich Wise, Adam Butler and Adrian Clayborn are executing a coordinated and suffocating attack on the pocket.

Up front the base moved more toward a six-man front that echoes a 4-3 under. Kyle Van Noy was consistently on the defensive left side, standing. Hightower would line up to the tight end side (taking the TE in coverage on pass plays) and Bentley would line up across the running back, who he’d have in coverage. This meant that Trey Flowers was able to move back to right side after playing the Ninkovich role on the left. That role appears to be going away.

That was the run stopping front, I’m not sure they played a single meaningful snap of a seven-man front, fka “base”.

The other nickel package against the pass was a 4-2 front and they rotated all four linebackers through, with Hightower and Bentley being the top pairing, but Van Noy and Roberts also got rotational time. The nickel back ends rotated between Jonathan Jones in the slot and Duron Harmon, who saw some time near the line of scrimmage, somewhat of a rarity for him.

The coordination between Chung, McCourty, Gilmore and Rowe was outstanding. They gave up a few plays, but overall they were really sharp, especially in contrast to last year’s opening debacle.

Here’s a bunch more notes on a really impressive first defensive outing…

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